AWWA IMTECH55836

A global approach to designing demineralized water production plants is currently lacking. This research focuses on developing computer tools for designing an appropiate plant from a technical perspective (satisfaction of technical and environmental constraints) and the best plant from an economical perspective (investment and production costs minimization). This approach is based on mathematical programming and uses optimization techniques. Water quality at each step influences the choice of production technology or processes, the design variable values, and consequently the whole plant cost. Therefore, elementary process models are combined into a single or integrated model. The integrated model described in this paper contains two elementary processes: reverse osmosis, and ion exchange. This model, combined with data describing input and output water quality (raw water quality and desired treated water quality and quantity), is solved by a non-linear optimization algorithm producing three types of results. Considering the cost and water data, the first are the selection of the best elementary processes to use from the economical and technical perspectives: ion exchange or reverse osmosis. The second output is the design of these elementary processes, defined by the optimal values of variables in the model. The third type of results consists of production costs values. Includes 22 references, figures.